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'Quietly' review or 'Shall we go for a pint or a punch?'

Quietly, Owen McCafferty

Soho Theatre, 28th May 2014

A barman watches a football
match on TV, Northern Ireland versus Poland. His pub is pretty bland. It is
clean and soulless, with little history clinging to its walls. But it’s
frightening what a lick of paint can conceal. This bar was blown up in the
1970s by a sixteen year old Protestant, killing six Catholics inside. ‘Quietly’
brings together two kids from opposing sides of this conflict and, forty years
on, sees them try to make sense of the troubles they have seen.

This is a gentle tremble of a
play from Owen McCafferty, who writes with moving restraint. Everything is held
back. Director Jimmy Fay keeps the show quietly motoring at a low and painful
pitch. The actors rarely raise their voices and there is a stubborn lack of
drama, which stops things feeling over-stated or manipulative. The facts behind
the bombing, which killed 6 innocent people and ruined countless other lives,
need no embellishment.

It’s the quietness about this
piece that makes it so powerful; it’s a play that forces you to lean in and
listen. One would think that two enemies meeting in a bar, after so many years,
might come to blows. The expectation of
violence lingers in the air but – and this is where the tension and sadness
comes from – that violence is very rarely released. It doesn’t need to be. The
anger that both these men once felt has been spent, beaten out of them and
replaced with shame and sorrow.

Patrick O’Kane plays Jimmy,
whose father was caught up in the bombing, as a would-be thug who has lost his
fire and rage. He looks always on the verge of throwing a punch but never quite
manages it. Instead, he prowls around with an anger that has nowhere to go. He
is trapped by his lack of hatred and hemmed in by his compassion. ‘I know what
world you lived in’, Jimmy tells Ian, and it is this sympathy for the bomber’s
struggle, which Jimmy finds most difficult to bear.

Declan Conlon’s Ian – who threw
a bomb in this pub when he was only 16 years old – walks around with his hands
always in his jacket pocket, a man turned inwards. When Jimmy describes the
impact of the bomb – ‘Everything inside had been blown outside’ – there are
echoes of Ian in that devastating description.

O’Kane and Conlon spar painfully
together but never lash out. The anger they both feel is for something bigger,
something beyond each other. Their anger is really directed at the hatred and
conflict that still lingers on the streets outside. When, near the end of the
play, some young boys start bashing on the windows of the bar, it feels like it
is that world outside where these two should have met and looked for answers.

But these two men are no
longer part of the violence and anger that still brews on the streets of
Belfast. They have moved beyond it and they look lost and lonely for it. McCafferty
portrays these two Belfast men, borne of conflict but now removed from it, as
equally displaced as the Polish barman they now drink with. It’s as if they no
longer fit in their bodies, this pub, their country.

After Ian confesses to the
bombing – and explains the events that led up to it – the stage falls silent.
The low chatter stops and stage is filled with a fathomless silence. The two
men shake hands, for just a slither of a second. It is the most painful moment
in the play. Forgiveness, we realise, is the toughest battle of all.